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On a day when Australia’s bowlers put away the hammer and went to work with the chisel, Patrick Cummins took his 200th wicket in Test cricket. That Cummins has reached this mark so quickly (44 matches) and so cheaply (21.7 runs per wicket) is not at all surprising.

Since his debut in 2011, and even during the six years of injury and recovery that followed, Cummins was Australian cricket’s most confident investment in long-term success. Nothing is inevitable in sport, but every now and then something can seem as if it is.

What is more comment-worthy is the manner and method behind his achievement, the type of bowler he has become.

When he arrived as that coltish teenager in South Africa, Cummins was an old-fashioned tearaway: very fast, a gambler, slightly erratic. A bowler with a hammer looking for a nail. Jeff Thomson, whose wicket tally Cummins equalled this week, was the model for this extreme paceman. It didn’t matter if Thommo bowled a bit of rubbish, the diamonds were worth the rocks.

It turned out that the erratic element inside Cummins was his back, which took those next six years to align and mature. As horse trainers know, sometimes you need to send a talented juvenile male away while they grow into their bodies. Often it helps to geld them. Not that this was advised or performed in Cummins’s case, but when he came back he was neither wild nor raw. He was Kingston Town after the snip.

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